


Pesach.

by Jackmerlin



Category: The Marlows - Antonia Forest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-04
Updated: 2015-08-04
Packaged: 2018-04-12 22:18:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4496829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jackmerlin/pseuds/Jackmerlin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>
  <strong>Prompt:</strong>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Miranda doing something explicitly Jewish (attending synagogue, lighting Shabbat candles, fasting on Yom Kippur, eating apples and honey on Rosh Hashanah, maybe going to a mikvah...) and the thoughts and reactions it calls up in her and the people around her.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Pesach.

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by Anonymous in the [Antonia_Forest_Fanworks_2015](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/Antonia_Forest_Fanworks_2015) collection. 



> **Prompt:**
> 
>  
> 
> Miranda doing something explicitly Jewish (attending synagogue, lighting Shabbat candles, fasting on Yom Kippur, eating apples and honey on Rosh Hashanah, maybe going to a mikvah...) and the thoughts and reactions it calls up in her and the people around her.

NOTE: This is set during the Easter holiday after the spring term which would follow RAH, so follows that timeline of the very late 70s/early 80s. (So the adults in this story were children during WW2)  
Any views expressed by Miranda are my imaginings of the thoughts of a fictional, agnostic teenager and are not intended to represent the real views of Jews in general; nor are the views expressed by any other character.

 

‘This is ridiculous,’ thought Miranda, not for the first time, as she retreated into her room to avoid the children who were running up the stairs, screaming with excitement. ‘All the better ways there must be to spend a holiday…’ She had been thinking this at regular intervals, ever since the letter from her mother arrived at school a week before the end of the spring term. They were to be spending a week of the holidays with a cousin of her mother’s and her family. Sarah was a second cousin twice removed or something equally distant, and Miranda had rarely met her or her husband Otto and their girls.  
There were several loud thumps and a series of squeals from further down the landing. Honestly, there were only two children, and relatively small ones at that; how could they make that much noise? Miranda, used to the tranquillity of being the only child in her home had often wondered how her friend Nicola coped with being one of eight. It must be like being at school all the time. But even school was better than this. The door crashed open violently.  
“Randa, we have to look in here!” the two children outside chorused. Without waiting for an answer they burst in. They were closely followed by their own mother carrying a candle, and Miranda’s mother, Miriam, brandishing a feather duster. Miranda hastily drew her feet up onto the bed as one of the children dived to look under it. The child emitted a triumphant squeal from under the bed, “Found it!” She wriggled back out and Miranda’s mother ostentatiously whisked the feather duster under the bed.  
The children ran out of the room followed by their mother, but Miranda’s mother hesitated, looking rather warily at Miranda.  
“I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen you holding a duster before,” said Miranda. “How does it feel?”  
“Miranda, you will try and get into the spirit of things, won’t you? Not sit here sulking on your own?”  
“I’m a bit old to be playing hide and seek with breadcrumbs, aren‘t I? . And wanting a little peace and quiet doesn’t mean I’m sulking!”  
“Well, yes, they are rather noisy children. But I thought it would be good for you to be part of a proper Passover for once.”  
“Mum, we always have Passover..”  
“Well, yes, we celebrate it, but we don’t do the whole thing properly. Not in the traditional way. And sometimes I feel you’ve missed out rather on that sort of thing.”  
“I didn’t think you or Dad bothered specially?”  
Her mother sat down on the bed beside her. Miranda made room rather edgily. Her mother wasn’t usually a sitting-on-beds-having-a-cosy-chat type of mum.  
“Well, no, maybe we’ve never felt we had to follow every tiny detail. But we’ve never given you the choice. And you’re at such a Christian school, I sometimes wonder if we made the right decision in sending you to Kingscote.”  
“But I like Kingscote.”  
“Yes, well of course it’s a good school or we wouldn’t have thought of it. But there must be times that you’re made to feel left out.”  
“Sometimes that’s a good thing,” said Miranda, thinking of her lazy Sunday mornings while the others were at chapel. “When it’s sausages for dinner again, there’s always someone wishes they could have Junior Supper with me.”  
“And all those Christmas productions?”  
“I like the Christmas things. They’re traditional,” protested Miranda.  
“That’s what I mean,” sighed Miriam. “It’s all their traditions. No acknowledgement that there are other, older traditions, just as valid. Or even that their beliefs are rooted in ours. The last supper they celebrate - that was a Passover meal, after all.”  
Miranda smiled, remembering the argument she’d had with Lawrie after their last scripture lesson. (‘I don’t get it. If Jesus was Christian, why was he doing Jewish things?’) “They do sort of realise I think,” she said. “Some of the time.”  
“Hmm. That may be. But you spend so much time on the sidelines of other peoples’ traditions. You need to know you’re part of something too, that was old generations before theirs even started.”  
Running feet and voices sounded further along the landing. “Aunt Miriam, you have to come!”  
Miriam rose to go. Before she could suggest Miranda came too, Miranda decided on the lesser of two evils and hastily said, “I think I’ll go and see if Auntie Talya needs any help in the kitchen.”

Auntie Talya grinned wordlessly at Miranda as she entered the kitchen, and Miranda smiled back. “Do you want any help, Auntie?”  
Auntie Talya was an elderly, distant relative of Sarah’s who had been given the title ‘auntie’ as an honorific many years ago. Nobody seemed to know any more quite how she was connected, or what her full name had ever been. Her great advantage, as far as Miranda was concerned, was that she didn’t chatter on endlessly; indeed she barely spoke. Now, she waved Miranda over to a pan on the stove, and indicated that she should stir. As Miranda took the big wooden spoon, Auntie Talya sprinkled in some cinnamon, releasing a beautiful smell from the mixture of chopped apples and walnuts. It was quite hypnotic, thought Miranda, stirring slowly. She wondered what her friends would be doing with their holidays. Nicola might be out riding on that super pony her friend lent her. Nicola’s holidays always sounded like a childrens’ story book. ‘The Twins have Fun In Dorset’ she thought dreamily, as she stirred. And there was the boy Nicola was friends with, she was never quite sure how he fitted in. And of course there were all the rest of the family riding and sailing and shooting all over the place. Did one shoot in the spring, she wondered. Probably not, what with all the chicks and lambs gambolling about, she thought foolishly, and spared a rather guilty thought for the large joint of lamb which Auntie Talya was preparing at the other end of the kitchen. Returning to Nicola, she thought how often Nicola seemed rather ambivalent talking about her holidays, as if she was leaving large chunks out that hadn’t been all that much fun.  
The mixture in the pan was turning into a rather satisfying gooey mess. Starting to feel involved in her task, she scraped her spoon diligently into the sides of the pan, making sure it didn’t stick. She briefly wondered about some of the others from school; Esther walking Daks on the Heath maybe; Tim doing - her imagination failed - probably nothing at all, but being very ostentatious about doing Absolutely Nothing At All.  
Auntie Talya peered over her shoulder into the pan. The charoset had turned a lovely reddish-brown colour. Auntie Talya removed the pan from the heat, and put it on the big, scrubbed table by the waiting seder plate.  
The big, silver seder plate might have passed for an ancient family heirloom, but Miranda knew her father had sought it out specially and brought it as a gift. She saw him now hovering tentatively outside the kitchen door.  
“Dad!” she said, as he peered through the door. “I’ve hardly seen you all day. Have you been hiding?”  
“I only get in the way of people when they’re cooking. Would you care to walk in the garden with me for a few minutes?”  
They went out through the utility room behind the kitchen, into a bright, sunny spring afternoon. Daffodils waved gaily as they trod along the crazy paving path. Her father was already smartly dressed, ready to go to the synagogue. Miranda slipped her arm through his.  
“How are you getting on?” he asked.  
“I like Auntie Talya,” she said. “She’s the only one who doesn’t seem to be trying terribly hard.”  
“Well, she’s been cooking a Passover meal since before I was born,” he replied. “It’s all a little new for Sarah and Otto.”  
“Why start suddenly if they weren’t always really Orthodox?”  
“It was having the children, I think,” said her father. “There seems to be something about having one’s own child that makes you think about your own parents. Trying to link the new generation to the old, I suppose.” He paused. Anyone else might have supposed he’d finished speaking as he was silent for so long, but Miranda knew him better.  
After a moment he continued, “Everybody staying here this weekend is Sarah’s family. Otto came to England as a very young boy. He was on the last trainload of children to leave Czechoslovakia, just before Germany invaded Poland. All his family were left behind. He was brought up by a foster family, very kind, very nice. After the war none of his relatives could be found. No parents, no grandparents, no cousins. No Auntie Talyas or second cousins twice removed.”  
Miranda felt suddenly small and shrivelled. Her father squeezed her arm gently.  
“Pesach is about renewal,” he continued, after a moment. “It is about release. Yes, we look back at the sufferings we have left behind, but we move forward too, to the promise of a new beginning. That’s why Otto wants to celebrate it with his daughters.”

 

Miranda stayed alone in the garden after her father left with the others to go to the synagogue. She sat on a slightly damp bench in the spring sunshine alone with her own thoughts until the two girls appeared. They had been sent to pick some daffodils to put in a vase to ‘make the room look pretty’, obviously a diversionary tactic to get them out from under the feet of an exasperated adult. “Not those ones,“ said Miranda hastily, as they were about to chop the finest blooms beside the path. “Let’s find some in a corner that no-one can see yet.” Behind the old cherry tree they found a sunny corner where the flowers bloomed unnoticed, and Miranda showed them the best ones to pick. “Not those full ones, they’ll look tatty really soon. Look for ones like this that are just about to open. They’ll be the most beautiful in the next day.” Away from their mother, the two girls seemed calmer and quite sensible, ‘almost tolerable’ thought Miranda.  
The warmth of the day was soon dying out of the afternoon, and she was glad to follow the girls back to the house and enter the welcoming heat and bustle of the kitchen. The enticing smells of cooked food filled the air. “There you are, Miranda!” said her mother, irritably handing her plates to carry through to the big dining room. The long table was covered with a crisp, white cloth on which Sarah was fussily arranging candlesticks and wine-glasses. The seder plate stood ready in the middle of the table. Miranda eyed the sticky pile of charoset which she had helped make, along with the burnt egg, the bone, the herbs and leaves. How odd all this would seem to anyone from school, she thought, wondering how much she ever could or would tell anyone about it. And yet, she suddenly thought, wouldn’t Nick like this? Standing here, setting out a table in exactly the same way it had been laid for hundreds, or even thousands of years. Making the same foods, and following the same rituals, using the same words, as all the generations before had done. How many women had chopped, stirred and cooked the same foods in preparation for this night? How many fathers had come home and lit the same candles? How many children had asked the same questions, ‘Why is it different?’ She had the strangest impression of travelling through time and touching hands with all the people who had gone before. 

“Miranda!” snapped her mother’s voice. “Miranda, you were miles away! You’d better go and get changed, the others will be back soon!”  
Miranda glanced down at the T shirt and jeans she had spent the day in, and agreed that she should indeed go. In her room, she pulled on this year’s version of the Disaster, another demure ‘little girlish’ dress, suitable for tea with relatives, but that Miranda wouldn’t have been seen dead in anywhere else. Why her mother kept buying them, she didn’t know. The expensive designer labels didn’t make them any more suitable to wear in front of her peers. Catching sight of her reflection in the mirror she grimaced and whisked out of the room and down the stairs.  
Her mother frowned slightly on seeing her, as if she’d been expecting a different looking daughter. Her father had returned from the synagogue looking happy and he smiled at Miranda. “You’re looking lovely,” he said fondly. He never did notice what she was wearing.  
Everyone was filling the dining room, milling round the table. As well as the Wests and Auntie Talya, Sarah’s sister and brother-in-law were visiting, and another distantly related male cousin. Finally they all settled down. By each place was a paperback haggadah. The seder began with Otto saying the blessings and pouring the wine. The children fidgeted and made faces at the taste of the parsley dipped in salt water. When Otto gave them the broken piece of matzah to hide, they ran out. They returned with an air of triumph, trying not to burst with their secret information.  
The youngest girl read the questions, and the adults recited the answers between them. Miranda listened to the familiar story unfold. What a dark story it was, she thought, and so terribly unlikely. Hadn’t she once said about the Christmas story at school that it was so madly unlikely that maybe it had to be true?  
She glanced at the two younger girls. When she was their age she too had heard the story with a child’s sense of fair play; the wicked oppressors had got their come-uppance and it served them right for keeping the Jews as slaves. As she grew older she became used to being the observer always looking in from the outside, and the story seen from this viewpoint began to trouble her. She imagined, as if hearing the story for the first time: the blood daubed over the doorways; death falling in the night on the Egyptian children; the sounds of dismay and grief following the escaping Jews; the sea parting before them and then rushing back to destroy the chariots with the terrified horses drowning in their traces.  
But of course it wasn’t literally true, she thought with relief, any more than her friends’ Christmas story was. It was stories that had the real power to move people, she thought, to bind them together or set them at each others throats. Or maybe people did those things anyway, and the stories came afterwards.  
She caught her father’s eye. He smiled gravely, and she felt better.  
At last the meal was served, and everyone relaxed and ate in a celebratory mood. The food was good; Auntie Talya nodded and grinned complacently at the compliments on her cooking. It was being an enjoyable evening after all, thought Miranda; the wine she had drunk softening her attitude. Even her mother was being quite relaxed and not trying to dominate as she usually did.  
Once the main part of the meal was over, there was more wine poured and more blessings. The hidden matzah was recovered and ransomed, then soon after the children were sent off to bed.  
Miranda sat on at the table, slowly swilling the remains of the wine in her glass. When enough time had elapsed to make the point that she wasn’t ‘one of the children’ she made her own excuses and withdrew supposedly to bed.  
In her room she half drew the curtains then turned off the light so that she no longer saw her own reflection gazing back at her. She pressed her forehead against the cold glass of the window. She needed some cool, dark peace to process her impressions of the evening.  
She had enjoyed it - more than she’d expected really. She had genuinely felt a shiver down her spine when they left the door open for Elijah at the end of the meal. She had joined in with the chorus, “Next year in Jerusalem!” and almost meant it as she said it. On this night she had felt she belonged to this world.  
Outside she could see only the dim shapes of the garden, and beyond the garden wall the orange glow of the city at night. Unseen and far away stars were born and died, comets sent planets spinning away, worlds collided. How puny her own world seemed sometimes, she thought, and how easily knocked off course. There were moments tonight when she had been entirely caught up in the ritual; eating together in the traditional way had seemed to make sense of everything. But then a stray thought about school, or her friends, could intrude and suddenly make her feel distant and separate. Just as when she had stood at the heart of the Christmas play dressed as an angel, she had been physically there but emotionally alien.  
Suddenly impatient with her own thoughts, she stepped back and pulled the curtains shut. There was no point thinking in circles. She would go to bed. As she slid under the covers she thought that she would like to be able to talk about these things properly with Nicola. It was a pity that it never quite seemed possible at school. There was always someone else around, or other things going on. Or it might be an embarrassing subject to bring up.  
She tilted the bedside lamp and settled herself comfortably with her paperback. One of the major benefits of being on holiday was that no-one would stop her reading in bed. In the morning, she thought, she would write to Nicola. By then just possibly, she might be able to edit her thoughts into an amusing account of the day.


End file.
